My research interests in modern European history center on fascism and colonialism, and most of my publications to date lie at the intersection of the two historiographies of Italian Fascism and of interwar imperialism. Within these broad areas, I have explored, among other topics, borderlands, sovereignty, and citizenship as well as migration and everyday life, and have deployed a variety of methodologies including oral history.
At the core of my monograph, Mussolini's Nation-Empire: Sovereignty and Settlement in Italy's Borderlands, 1922-1943 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), is an interest in sovereignty and state power. The book explores how, in the light of new interwar norms of sovereignty and national self-determination, the Fascist regime sought to assert and consolidate its rule over contested regions at the antipodes of the Italian nation — in newly annexed provinces in the North and in colonial territories across the Mediterranean in Libya. At the same time, the book asks how ordinary people made sense of, challenged, and rethought their place in society in the context of shifting state boundaries and collective identities.
Building on this study, I am currently pursuing the broader question of how the fascists practiced imperialism. My forthcoming book in the Cambridge Elements series will ask how far and why the Axis empires had a particular approach to empire-building that marked them as different from other imperial powers.
Another persistent interest has been in the experience of war in difficult environments, in the Alps during the First World War but also in concentration camps during Italy’s colonial war in Libya. My extended review of the scholarship on World War One in Italy appeared in the Journal of Modern History in 1918. I am the co-author of two edited volumes. One examines the effects of the principles undergirding the Paris peace settlements across Europe, Beyond Versailles: Sovereignty, Legitimacy, and the Formation of New Polities after the Great War, co-edited with Marcus Payk. The other tackles the question of coercion and consent in Fascist Italy and presents the work of a new generation of Italian scholars working on Fascism, In the Society of Fascists: Acclamation, Acquiescence and Agency, co-edited with Giulia Albanese.
The final major element of my scholarship is an interest in citizenship, and specifically citizenship under Mussolini’s rule. Citizenship offers a productive category to observe the regime rewriting the contract between individual and state and reconfiguring the benefits and obligations of national belonging along authoritarian lines. It also exposes the central challenges and paradoxes of a regime that destroyed democracy and racialized Italianness but nevertheless sought legitimacy both at home and abroad in an age of popular sovereignty.
The College of Arts + Sciences